Penia Golfeld was born in Tulchyn in 1932. He was imprisoned in the Pechera concentration camp during the war. After the war, he trained at a technical institute and found work in a shoe factory, where he was employed for forty-nine years. He served for four years in the military. He married and has a son.
Other Interviews:
From Tulchyn to PecheraInside the Camp
Tulchyn, Ukraine
Penia Goldfeld describes in this clip the harsh circumstances, in which he survived the Pechera concentration camp . In particular, Penia recalls how he fought off starvation, eating beetroot during the winter period.
In total, about 15,000 Jews were deported from Transnistria into Reichskommissariat Ukraine between spring 1942 and early 1944, at least 4,800 of whom came from the Tulchyn district. In Bershad, the Gestapo, which had established a unit in the city in the spring of 1943, took about 1,200 residents into the Reichskommissariat for work, where most perished.
In the Reichskommissariat, the Germans worked the prisoners to death on starvation rations, or shot them when they became too sick to continue laboring. In a final statement, toward the end of the occupation as the Red Army approached, the retreating Germans murdered many of those Jews who had survived the labor brigades and remained relatively strong. About 2,500 prisoners from Pechera were seized for work in the Reichskommissariat.
This is how Pinia remembers German procedure to collect camp prisoners for forced labor:
Source: Jeffrey Veidlinger, In the Shadow of the Shtetl: Small-Town Jewish Life in Soviet Ukraine (Indiana University Press, 2013)